Be a skeptic, damnit!
How to learn in amidst the fire-hose of information
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One of the most important uses of “information” is to make better decisions. In training, for example, there are tidbits of information that, when enacted, will make your progress faster. This might be something like “keep the easy days easy” or “carbohydrates are important for high intensity training.” If you don’t know those tidbits, or ignore them, your training progress might be pretty slow. But there are other tidbits of information, and let’s just use the opposite cases (“easy is for quitters,” and “fasting makes you faster”) that if you enact them, can actually slow down your progress.
NOTE: I think almost all pieces of training information out there ARE useful, but there are some that are useful almost all the the time to almost everyone (“keep the easy days easy”) and there are some that are only useful to a small number of people a small amount of the time (“fasting makes you faster”). For now let’s simplify the argument to say that there are some pieces that are useful (broadly applicable to most people), and some that are not (rarely applicable to a very small audience).
SO, how do we know what’s useful? I’d say there are a couple main ways: You can try it on yourself in a really scientific way, or you can do some active research. I’d argue that until you do one of those things, that tidbit of information should be considered not useful and should pretty much be ignored.
Try it yourself in a really scientific way
Want to know how useful a piece of information is for you? Do some kind of test on what that thing should change, and then act on that piece of information for 6-12 weeks super consistently, and then test again. Were you better? If you were, then in this narrow context (you, over a relatively short period of time), this piece of information was useful! And importantly, that’s all you know about it. You don’t know if it’s actually useful for other people. You don’t know if it’s useful over longer periods. You don’t know if it’s useful for other sports, or seasons, or at different ages or fitness levels, or any of that shit.
And importantly, you cannot do this process in less than 4-6 weeks! Trying it for a single week doesn’t mean shit. Any large change in your training (like changing carb status from high to low or vice versa) is going to take at least a couple weeks for your body to just settle down and get into a groove. You might see great results for a couple weeks, and then the wheels fall off because it’s inherently unsustainable for you. Or you might see crap results for a couple weeks as your body is adjusting, and then it all starts working nicely. So you have to give a change a whole training block to actually figure out if it is useful!
Do some active research
Hear an idea on social media? “Bicarb. It’s the shit, this study says so” you read from a reputable source. Ok great. Step one: THIS INFORMATION SHOULD NOT BE CONSIDERED USEFUL YET. There are several reasons for this.
Individual pieces of information, even from a scientific journal article don’t mean shit. Science isn’t about individual papers, it’s about the collective information that we gain from lots of them. The data in a single paper can be twisted in a lot of ways. Mistakes could have been made, contexts could be misunderstood. If I’m trying to get to the bottom of a subject, I’m reading no less than 5-7 papers from different sides of the argument and trying to figure out whether it’s worth it to talk to some other experts in the field, because individual papers don’t mean shit!
Motivations are all over the place! Even if you have a good person on the other end of that piece of social media telling you that bicarb is great, you have to remember that especially on social media, there are several levers pushing them at the very least exaggerate a little. And so while maybe they do believe that bicarb is good, and hell, let’s assume they’re actually right, they might accidentally blow the effects up by quite a bit, in order to get you to buy some. This is one of the most common social media effects I see, is to take something that sure, works a little in very small amounts of people some of the time, and it’s presented as something that works in all people all of the time. They aren’t wrong, but maybe all their motivations are pushing them to exaggerate.
SO: In order to actually figure out whether this piece of information is useful or not, you need to do a couple things:
Google search that shit, but in pretty specific ways to you: “bicarb use in 50yo female cyclists.”
Read several articles.
Then do the same thing, but trying to find the arguments against. “Who shouldn’t use bicarb” or “why shouldn’t I use bicarb.”
And then, once you have a decent idea of the arguments for and against, go to one of your favorite sources of knowledge on the subject ( a coach, a trainer, a physiologist, etc), and ask them about it! I know I like answering questions and helping athlete go through this shit, and I know a lot of other coaches or physiologists who LOVE talking through this shit with someone who’s at least done a little research. And hell, maybe ask them who else they’d recommend reaching out to!
Remember what the other costs are if you get this wrong. You could end up spending both money and time and having it do nothing or even set you back considerably. It’s very much worth spending time outside of training to figure out if this claim is going to be useful for you!
“But coach,” you might say, “I read/hear/watch about tens to hundreds of these claims a day. I can’t possibly be expected to either spend 4-12 weeks figuring this out, or read multiple papers and talk to multiple experts about how to use it” for every single one of them?!?! Well, you can either take in and use shit information and have it most likely slow down your training, or you can do two things here that will help a lot.
Be a skeptic. Assume that most things are at least partially false, and that their effects are being exagerated. This is especially true of things that sound new or novel! The human body hasn’t changed appreciably in hundreds of thousand of year, and most of the current best practices have been know for a hundred years. The only thing that I’m doing with most athletes most days that’s fundamentally different from what coaches were doing 100 years ago is eating more carbs. That’s it. All the other “new” shit from bicarb to norwegian double threshold to ice baths are used, yes, but probably less than 1% of the time.
Take in less information! I read some tidbit of information a few years ago about how the amount of information the average human takes in is something like 100X what it was just a couple hundred years ago. Instead of having a major library in a city that took days/weeks to get to, now we have all the knowledge of the entire history of human civilization in our pocket and it can be accessesd instantly. Not only that, but we have entire businesses and organizations whose job it is to fire-hose information at us as quickly as we can flick our finger. It’s literally impossible to figure out if all the information that’s coming into your ear/eyeholes is useful. SO, take in less! Use social media for entertainment, not for information. Stop listening to bro-science podcasts unless you’re there to research a specific thing. Stop reading the news all the goddamn time. When you want to know something, research it actively. Don’t let all this weird highly financially motivated shit come past until you’re confused and pissed off and inconsistently training because you keep trying new shit every week.
Places where I see athletes get this wrong:
Social media claims, trying to get you to buy their thing.
Your fucking watch trying to get you to pay attention to it more (I will likely do a whole post on how fucked 98% of the “information” coming out of your watch is).
Training partners/competitors trying to sound knowledgable
Podcasts trying to keep you listening, and being sponsored by shit.
Sadly, with uninformed professionals. I’ve seen a LOT of athletes come to me with some just flat fucking wrong information that they paid a coach/nutritionist/trainer/PT a lot of money to learn.
While the accessibility of knowledge and information is really cool and in some ways really useful, it’s created a world where not only is it really difficult to tell what’s true and what’s not, most of us have given up even trying! When was the last time you spent an hour trying to figure out if some small piece of information from your favorite giver-of-truth (some politician, educator, coach, etc) was actually true?
I’ll go out on a limb and say that this is the largest problem in the world right now,
I hope those of you that read this now read/watch/listen to everything through the lens of “it’s probably not true.”
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Take for example Scott Johnston. I highly admire him for what he does in the endurance domain but is it the only way to train & wi UTMB? Not at all. Prior winners haven't done this & surely have won in record times on both men and women's side. I listened to every bit of podcast that is available online of Scott Johnston just to pick up his mind. He himself said that it wasn't just because of the specific kind of training, both Ruth & Tom were great athletes before coming to coach under him. There were n number of factors which gets under shadowed or doesn't get seen or emphasized.
No one size fits all. There is no holy grail method or you can say there is no perfect human, no perfect business plan, no perfect education system, no perfect country or state, no perfect parenting principles, no perfect training principles. One needs to do research in any walk of life as we can't we keep doing copy paste in our own lives by seeing what works for other people. But I also feel like I have the approach of open book as well.
I listened to what Tom did for UTMB in the whole race & it seemed this might the most meticulous one has been. He even put his earphones on in the areas he knew the crowd would be quite loud. just to be attuned with his own self and negate the outside noise in order his own body doesn't get over whelmed and his HR doesn't go up which would increase his effort. Just to keep things in control he did this.
Even both Tom Evans & Ruth Croft were more proactive than other elites who were running in the Top-50 on both sides. Ruth learned her lesson from Transvulcania because the weather was horrendous there somewhat similar to UTMB just not snowing but the winds were howling. David Sinclair & Matt Daniels also DNFed because of the weather. Tom told that almost no one was putting the jacket in the lead pack when he had already put up a jacket. He told everyone thought that Francois hasn’t put up a jacket and he is 4 time winner of this race, so better mimic him but Tom did it in his own way. The role of being proactive in ultras is quite an under rated Trait.
On the other side I think so that the coaches who say that muscular endurance training is a waste of time majorly doesn't reflect a lot about training but a lot gets reflected about them as coaches. They say this because- they might not have incorporated this in the training, they are quite narrow minded cognitively to broaden their horizon of training, they want to stick to what worked for them, might be they incorporated muscular endurance training but didn't work out and the they didn't get the expected results from the stimuli. Matthew Richtman even didn't knew about double threshold workouts and even he ran a 2:07:57 in his debut marathon at Los Angeles Marathon in March of this year. And after that he has been dealing with some sort of injury. But it all boils down there is no holy grail method in any particular sport, there are n number of ways to train for any distance in running. One has to be flexible while applying any kind of training, have a gauge how body is responding, what benefits one is getting, what are the risk factors of present training and what tweaks can be made. It's not a copy paste kind of thing meaning as Scott Johnston said apply it in absolute terms, one might not see the results and then they verbally bash Scott that his training method just works for professionals, they won't question themselves are they doing it the right way and are they focusing on other 90% of training that is sleep, nutrition, strength workouts, mobility/conditioning throughout the whole year. Everything compounds one should remember.
I also listened to Rachel Entrekin's podcast & loved the part where she told she is open book. She has been chipping away with consistent progress. It is not an overnight success, she had been competing for almost 12-13 years. On the other side, yesterday I listened to Will Murray on Freetrail and that dude is one heck of a SENSEI. The way he trains- incorporating cycling with running. Some days he cycles for 4-5 hours comes back home and then in 10 minutes transition goes for a run for about whatever his training says for that particular day. And I don't think so anyone has one JJ 100 miler in record time training like this. Everyone who has won has been all running people on men's side.
Right now Taggart Vanetten is preparing for 100 miler at Prairie Spirit Trail on March 28, 2026. Last 11 weeks has been 80 miles(128 KM) running & 200 miles(320 KM cycling) for every week. He has totally changed his way of training as earlier he used to run 150 mile weeks in order to prepare for 100 milers but he has understood no point in this much beating on legs & the whole body in every facet. Cycling helps him build the huge Aerobic Base. He is targeting to dip under 11:19 which is current 100 mile American Record. If this training works for him, then this can be the new modus operandi as earlier it has worked for Will Murray as well.
Adam Lipschitz ran 2:08:54 at Valencia Marathon in 2024 on just 100 KM weeks.
Nothing is concrete- be it belief system, be it any opinion, be it any idea or anything. Getting hooked to any particular thing does no good, life is all about adapting to ever changing dynamics.
Strong opinions loosely held and being open ears to learning is the way to propel in life.
It has become a lot difficult in the ever growing content and information market to saturate what is noise and what is the real information. As Daniel Kahneman & Cass Sunstein wrote in the book NOISE- that in how many ways there is flaw in human judgment.
I have been running from June of 2020. This is regarding running but be can be applied to different walks of life as well. Not every moment of life needs to be optimized. Before adding things into our lives, we can look for things that can be subtracted or can be eliminated.
I started running back in June of 2020. I was firstly using a classic Samsung button phone for a couple of months to track just the total time of my runs as I didn't kept a smartphone from 2016 to 2022. Then I bought a Casio watch, not taking my phone on the run to note the total timings of my run. I kept it this way till November of 2024. No smart watch, no strava and no other app to track the metrics. This was also because I didn't intended to keep running for this long. Now I have been using both Coros Pace Pro & Strava since last November. I have been some sort of like Anti Technology and didn't wanted to be tied to all these numbers.
I just wear it on my runs to track my runs and other than that it sits in a drawer. I don't know how many runners are highly attuned with their effort and if they know how do they feel in specific paces while they run.
One is running with earphones listening to music, audiobooks or podcasts. Watch to track and above that HR band around the chest or even the Coros armband for accurate HR tracking. Isn't this on daily basis a lot of information which can impede the feeling one needs to quite aware of in the present moment. It is somewhat solely relying on gadgets. First principles thinking is in quiet scarcity now a days in any walk of life. Everybody wants to copy paste and expect to get the desired results. One can't take the route to peak w/o going to the valleys. In winters, I wear long sleeve and my watch is hidden under it and a lot of the times I try to don't see what HR is or what is the pace I am running. Sometimes it is all about putting in the work and not every minute has to be judged as our brain goes haywire in a very short period of time.
Personally speaking the perception of effort is a major factor. When I say to myself that I have to go on a run for 30 KM at hard effort, my cognition itself knows that this is gonna be quite tough and heartbeat can be felt in head as well. So, it has an idea of what kind of tough it can be but when sometimes I have a 20 KM run or shorter run- it can feel like tough around 12-14 KM mark. Ellen Langer, a renowned psychologist at Harvard did a research and asked people to do jumping jacks and asked when they felt tired, the answer was not a number but two thirds of the way they felt tired. Even if it was asked to do 100, then also around 66 which 2/3 of the way & when asked to do 200- then also 2/3 of the way which is around 135.
It is quite a tough thing make a mark that if smart watches makes runners worse. But I totally understand your point that how it can make an impact on how we perceive things and how it can limit on race day to go the depth of reservoir of pain cave & pushing to nth level. Both Joe Klecker & Biya Simbassa have been running races on sheer determination to do great & not watches let them dictate how they are feeling. Joe Klecker even said no watch or no HR or pace can tell them when to make move. Even Emile Cairess can be seen wearing a simple Casio watch during the marathons and too being Majors where the competitions is cut throat. Nina Engelhard as well trains with no watch & even Zach Miller used to train with a Casio watch, not tracking numbers in first 3-4 years of his running. I still remember Miller vs Hawks youtube video of TNF Endurance Challenge 50 miler in 2016, they weren't relying on numbers- that was sheer end to end battle with grit and not letting their perception of pain getting over them. What happened at CCC which was this year a 60 KM race, I don't think so Jim relied on keeping HR under control sort of thing for 5 hours- he ran as fast as he could for the whole distance. What happened at World Athletics Championship at Tokyo b/w Aphonce Simbu & Amanal Petros.
If you are talking about pain perception and that too in ultras, the example of UTMB 2022. The goat Kilian Jornet was in the trenches and was about to pull the plug from the race but Blanchard came and motivated him to keep moving. Kilian Jornet's perception of pain had surpassed and he himself felt like he emptied the reservoir but it seems even this experienced of an overall athlete misjudged or was taken away by the pain he was feeling at that particular lowest of lows. At the end, Kilian ended up continuing & winning the race in CR time. how is this possible when an athlete was almost about to throw in the towel but ended up winning in CR time. Pain perception is a lot of mental training and not being over whelmed by what one feeling during the lows. And numbers should be a part of training but not should be dictating especially in ultras, everyone has to enter pain cave in ultras. Could Jim have closer to the 100 KM WR times, if he would have kept looking at his watch & HR in 2021 Carbox X2 project, it could have made his cognition go haywire for sure if the numbers would have been a bit off. He missed it by 12 seconds.
Smart watches should play a role and not be over powering over an individual meaning they are just taking every thing on absolute terms which the data is dictating. We need to find a balance to train with watches & Strava as well.
It goes both ways, training is both Easy & Complex. If we are into starting phase meaning we have started any activity we need not focus on zones as our first priority should be- We should have the drive to do it for at least couple of years to see some significant gains in physiology. And yeah at the start every kind of training works as a stimuli, it comes after a couple of months or one can say a couple of years as well when they need to focus on 1% improvement markers. Fundamental is the key meaning putting in the work, nutrition during the workout & for the whole day for months on and recovery in terms of sleep. Sticking to basics does wonders but in this era of information overload & easy access to it, we are focusing firstly to 1% improvement markers rather than 99%.
Joy has to be in the drive seat of training as well. Ben Dhiman after coming 2nd in UTMB simply put one gotta love doing this, then only one can succeed. Tom Evans also said his relationship with running went to that he had to perform & win but before this year's UTMB, he reclaimed his relationship with running which got reflected in his win. Ruth Croft has been having a similar approach for more than a decade. Does Courtney not have fun, when almost 99.99% would have quit, she kept chipping away and continued to cherish the community she was surrounded with.
But even I myself have learned this the hard way, I have read tons of books, listened to almost fifteen thousand podcasts. When I read Scott Fauble & Ben Rosario's book Inside a Marathon, then I got a glimpse of how much of just running people like myself are doing, meaning just running and not training. People want to just run fast in just a couple of weeks or months, but this not how our physiological & muscular adaptations take place. As Kilian Jornet said it takes months and years for your bodies to adapt to the stimuli and our cells and mitochondria to adapt and get the stimulus to get fast and build a huge aerobic base. People don't want to run easy, they just see it on multiple social media platforms and then come to a conclusion I am no where near what people run, I need to run this fast but they need to study multiple coaches from Arthur Lydiard, Renato Canova, Jack Daniels, Joe Vigil, Ed Eyestone, Mike Scannell and others as well.